Government Nutrition Mandates

LRC BLOG:

A short while ago, I wrote about the government's decision to categorize pizza as a "vegetable" so that it could stay on track to enable the profits of the Industrial Food Machine. Now comes this article from the Wall Street Journal: "Schools Told to Lighten Up Lunches: New Rules for Federally Subsidized Meals Set Limits on Calories, Saturated Fat; Pizza, Fries Survive." A quote from the article:

...And for the first time, the Department of Agriculture is setting calorie limits on school-cafeteria meals.

A lunch for students in kindergarten through fifth grade must contain no more than 650 calories on average. The limit goes up to 700 calories for grades six through eight, and 850 calories for grades nine through 12. That requirement begins next school year.

Federal officials had initially sought to reduce the amount pizza counts toward students' vegetable allotment and to put limits on french fries and other forms of white potatoes. But those changes were abandoned after drawing criticism from lawmakers and the food industry.

Government rules also prohibit schools from serving whole milk; instead, non-fat milk must be served. This is in spite of the fact that the dangers of drinking the government's politically correct milk are well known. The USDA rules do not allow subsidized lunches to contain more than 10% of calories saturated fat. The same old low-fat paradigm that has been a failure for four decades is being reinstated as the "new" paradigm, and all for the purpose of propping up the corporate-socialist Industrial Food Machine that reaps huge margins on its highly processed foods.

Here is another great "follow the money" quote from the article:

One source of saturated fat the agency wasn't able to cut down on is the french fry. The agency initially proposed to sharply limit starchy vegetables like potatoes on school menus, but lawmakers and farm lobbyists killed the effort last year. Do most folks ever stop to consider the insanity of government bureaucrat rats centrally planning the lunches of millions of American children?

Consequently, this is a frightening - but hardly surprising - statistic from the article that answers the question of why the industrial food machine spends so much time and money buying politicians votes in Washington D.C : "About 32 million children are served every school day in the federal school lunch or breakfast programs, according to the Agriculture Department."

Meanwhile, Food Czar Michele Obama continues her campaign to centrally plan American eating habits, one plate at a time. In this recent article in the Washington Post, Mrs. Obama again made the claim, "That’s how we solve this problem," meaning government and its centrally planning mechanisms. She states, “We’re not just making this generation healthy. We’re making the next, and the next and the next.” In fact, that's the same thing the Food Czars said back in 1977 when they established the dietary goals for the United States, and thirty-five years later, Americans are fatter and sicker and more dependent upon their masters than any generation before them.